Large organizations having multiple facilities around the world can use a lot of energy to power each facility and each facility's systems, including but not limited to electricity used for electrical outlets, lighting, heating, and/or cooling. With energy costs on the rise and the desire to reduce energy consumption for environmental reasons, organizations are increasingly trying to find ways to cut energy usage. There is the potential for significant savings if a large organization can reduce, even slightly, the amount of energy it uses for electricity through electrical outlets, lighting, heating, and/or cooling in the organization's offices, stores, warehouses, and other remote facilities. This may be especially true in the case of organizations that have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of remote facilities spread out across the world in different climates. As such, there is a need to develop apparatuses and methods to efficiently monitor and manage energy-using systems across a plurality of remote facilities in various climates and to manage those utilities in a way that tries to minimize the amount of energy used at the various facilities, while still providing suitable environments for the organization's employees and customers.
Furthermore, as energy conservation systems and methods are developed to reduce the organization's energy usage, the organization needs a way to assess such conservation systems and methods before installing them at a facility to determine if they will, in fact, reduce energy consumption, and to determine if they will be cost effective. This can be difficult for an organization having facilities all over the world because the climate at each facility can vary greatly from one facility to the next, and climate can have a significant impact on energy usage. After implementation of an energy conservation system or method at a particular facility, the organization may also desire to determine the effects of the energy conservation system or method to determine whether the system or method has been successful.